Movie of the Day: Urotsukidoji – Legend of the Overfiend (1989)

07Sep

There is a certain type of individual that I greatly admire. It is the individual who can sit across a table from me and explain in exhaustive detail the very complicated plot fabric of Urotsukidoji: The Legend of the Overfiend, fully divulging all theories and histories and backstories and somehow never crack a smile. The smile comes to my lips when I realize that they have explained this movie over and over again to various people and are skilled at dodging the question of how and why a movie about a universal demon war includes scene after scene of naked lesbian schoolgirls.

What also puzzles me is how they can explain the movie with a straight face after they’ve introduced the film to their friends by waving a VHS tape, smiling and saying “Dude! You gotta see this”. For those of us who have had this movie shoved down our throats, that experience is communal.

Those individuals waving the tapes aren’t hard to find. They very often hide the tape in the underwear drawer and their only real female attachment is either a paper fold-out or is telling them for the third time to take out the garbage (I know them, I know them well). Not to say that everyone who engages in hentai is a pathetic momma’s boy but based on my experience they seem to make up a good chunk of the fanbase.

Hentai (porn, let’s just call it what it is), for those of us who don’t indulge in such questionable “entertainments” is more or less and endurance test. The filmmakers throw in as many splatter-fied effects and forbidden sexual tableaus as their imaginations can allow. It is often called “sick” and “disgusting” but I find less interest in the movies themselves and more interest in the people who gawk at them. These are individuals who did not discover whitehouse.com by accident. (Freud would have eaten these people for breakfast).

I should start by telling you that the movie is a carnival geek show, a vile bag of cartoon garbage that wallows in perversions when it isn’t splattering the canvas with guts and brains. It has, needless to say, become legendary for it’s infamy. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, perhaps you are not familiar with this nasty little item. For you, I will try and explain in the terms that the movie was explained to me:

There are three worlds and three levels of reality – the humans, the man-beasts (or Jyujinkai) and demons (or Makai). A prophecy tells that every three thousand years a creature called Chojin will rise up and unite these three worlds and will recreate all three worlds in his own image.

Two sibs from the Beast World, Amano Jyuku and Negumi, have come in search of Chojin who lives within a young student named Nagumo, whom they believe will bring about the aforementioned unity.

Nagumo has fallen in love with a cheerleader named Akemi, who was raped by a demon posing as her (female) health teacher and understands the circumstances behind Nagumo’s destiny. But opposing forces begin showing up to challenge Nagumo. For the Demons, Beasts, and Humans, this looks like either unity or utter destruction. Now, based on the creature that shows up at the end with three sex organs with which he demolishes the city, my guess would be the latter. There is far more plot that this but there is far more plot than the movie needs. I am told that there are two sequels to this but I think I’ll pass, thank you very much.

The gentleman who explained it to me went into massive amounts of details about the inwards and outwards of the demon world while I waited patiently so that I could ask how it all merits the pedophilia, the teen sex and the fountains of blood, guts and bodily fluids. `That’s just anime’ he told me at which I simply rolled my eyes and bolted for the door.